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Ticket Resellers Asking High Prices for Final Grateful Dead Shows

From left, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Warren Haynes of the Dead at the Gramercy Theater in Manhattan in 2009.Credit Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times

The last time Chicago’s Soldier Field hosted a Grateful Dead show, there was no such thing as StubHub.

Times have changed: The online secondary ticket market is exploding after passes to see the band’s four surviving members at the stadium this summer sold out immediately on Saturday, when nearly half a million fans swarmed the Ticketmaster website.

“Ticketmaster told us that they’d never seen more people queued up online,” said Peter Shapiro, who is co-producing “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of Grateful Dead” at Soldier Field July 3 through July 5. The shows will see the Dead’s core four — Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir — joined by the keyboardist Jeff Chimenti, the pianist Bruce Hornsby and the Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio in what is being billed as the band’s final performance, 20 years after its last show with Jerry Garcia at the same venue.

On Monday, Internet resellers had listed three-day passes for the event on StubHub starting at $1,300 (with obstructed views) and reaching into the low six figures. Tickets for Sunday’s finale were also listed for resale starting at more than $600 each — again with crummy sightlines.

Photo

Jerry Garcia playing with the Grateful Dead at a concert in New York's Tompkins Square Park in 1967.Credit Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times

An attempt to work around the 21st-century ticketing market was overwhelmed as well: Ahead of the Ticketmaster sale, Deadheads were offered admission through the Grateful Dead Ticketing Service, a throwback mail-order system, but demand was too high. “We’ve been submerged in a sea of mail,” said a note on the event’s website. “There were many, many times more order requests than anyone imagined” — more than 60,000 envelopes and money orders in all, Mr. Shapiro said.

More than 200,000 tickets – face value ranged from $59.50 to $199.50 — have been sold for the weekend in all, he added.

“We’re going to try to make the shows available for everyone,” Mr. Shapiro said, teasing the possibility of “satellite events taking place simultaneously.”

“Technology brings good and bad,” he said. “The secondary market did not exist like this for the last Dead shows, but what also didn’t exist was the ability to bring the show in high-quality audio and video to other venues and to your home at the same time.”